With a record audience also tuning on Univision, Sunday’s United States/Portugal match earned one of the largest sports audiences of the year.
The USA/Portugal FIFA World Cup match earned 6.5 million viewers on Univision, the network’s largest audience ever for a United States match and its second-largest for a group play match involving any team. The only group play telecast to earn a larger audience on Univision was Brazil/Mexico earlier in this year’s tournament (6.8M).
The match also earned 18.2 million viewers on ESPN, the largest audience ever for a World Cup match on a single U.S. network.
Combined, ESPN and Univision earned approximately 24.7 million viewers for the match, the largest audience ever for the World Cup in the United States. The previous high was 24.3 million for the Spain/Netherlands final in 2010, and the previous high for a non-final was the USA/Ghana Round of Sixteen match in 2010 (19.4M). Both of those matches aired on ABC and Univision.
Excluding the NFL and the Olympic Games, USA/Portugal ranks as the second-most watched sporting event of 2014. Only the Florida State/Auburn BCS National Championship Game, which aired on ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNEWS, earned a larger audience (26.4M). Including the NFL and the Olympics, the match ranks sixteenth.
USA/Portugal topped all-but-two NBA games since 1998, all-but-one Major League Baseball game since 2004, every single college basketball game since 1999, and every NHL telecast in U.S. TV history.
Among adults 18-49, the match had a combined 9.9 rating (7.1 on ESPN, 2.8 on Univision). The 9.9 is the largest rating in the demo for any non-NFL sporting event — including the Olympics — since Game 7 of the 2013 NBA Finals (10.6).
(Sun. numbers from Univision, ESPN)
